Work Text:
“Yit that traytour […]
Turns hym furthe tite, and talks no more
Went wepand awaye, and weries the storndys
That ever his werdes ware wroght, siche wandrethe to wyrke”
(Allitterative Morthe Arthure)
The sky should not have been so dark today. It is barely midday, and this should have been a peaceful day. But the sun is gone, along with any hope of changing things.
It doesn't cause you any pain. Darkness is your most ancestral memory.
You were born in darkness. You were always destined to live there. Generous hands have rescued you from the abyss only to lead you onto a path devoid of light.
Deep down, you have known it from the beginning.
Before you even knew who you really were there was a voice that came from the night and whispered to your soul. You knew you were fated to be more than just a fisherman's son.
You thought your destiny was to become the heir of a king. You realized too late that you had to be an avenger.
Your father must pay for what he did.
It seems everyone has forgotten the massacre he chose to carry out. Everyone except you. And now you will bring justice and take your rightful place.
You could have repressed your hatred if it weren't for the blood that unites you. You did not ask to be born. You are just the result of his actions, but he's always been too busy looking at you suspiciously to realize that. He never wanted you and he tried to destroy you as soon as you came into this world. The time has come to punish him.
And you don't care how many will be burned by your revenge. Not anymore.
You could have spared Guinevere. But she didn't deserve to have Gareth pay for her. You wished it was her beautiful, cruel face to be frozen in death, her head to be severed. She could have loved you. If not as a wife, then at least as a friend.
But you are the symbol of her husband's guilt, and this is enough to make you enemies.
Now it doesn't matter anymore. You stopped desiring her. When you return, seeing her become aware that in the end you won - the bastard, the traitor, the sick fruit of the king's sin - will be enough.
This time you are certain to win. The darkness around you is witness to this. You will have what is yours, you will avenge the victims of your father, your mother...
And yourself.
Maybe your father thought this time would never come. Maybe he believed that welcoming you into his court was enough to erase the fact that he tried to kill you.
He was naive enough to think you were harmless and he thought that, like everyone else, you couldn't see through his mask of justice and virtue.
All you had to do was look him in his eyes to know what he thought of you. A youthful mistake, a child that should never have been born, dangerous just for existing. He could never have been a father to you. He could never see you as anything other than an enemy.
Now he doesn't hide it anymore.
All your life you have done what he taught you. You have lied. You will rise to power by cheating and killing, as your grandfather did, and you will prove yourself to be your father's worthy son. Then the throne can only be yours.
You are not alone. You have an army with you. Men who saw you worthy of being king, men who long to see you in your father's place. And it doesn't matter that they only follow you for the benefits you promised them. They chose to help you. They chose to raise you to the place you should not have conquered by force. They are more loyal to you than your family ever was.
You have them, and more. You have the blood of kings on your side. You are about to kill a murderer If there really is a just God, He can only be on your side.
You can finally take off the mask you've kept on for years and breathe. For the first time, you are truly alive.
This unnatural night that has fallen on the world will be the dawn of victory for you.
The lie you have woven all these years has come to an end. Just a few hours and you will be king. You will get what you want. You will be respected, you will be loved.
You have to keep telling yourself this until it's all over. Just one last trick on yourself. Just enough to keep going.
Then you will be satisfied with having repaired the wrong you have suffered. You will be able to go on living alone. It won't be too difficult – it's just what you've done so far.
You were born for this moment, to follow the path that fate had written for you. You will have to be able to survive what comes next.
You will have to delude yourself that you can achieve victory. That you can be the master of your destiny.
You have believed in your hatred for so long that you no longer perceive its meaning, but you have gone too far to stop now. You've been alone too long to find a way to bridge the gap between you and your father. From the beginning you had to take on this role. Thus said the prophecy that shaped you.
Deep down you are aware that only emptiness will come afterwards. You've been waiting for this moment your whole life. And you are afraid, because without the desire that has sustained you so far you will no longer be anything.
This will be your last moment. If you survived, you could try to be reborn. You could truly live, finally, once you are free from your father's shadow.
But you are not made for the light of life. Only for this darkness. Only in this moment, now that you are so close to your goal, you really exist.
And nothing has changed compared to before. You are still completely alone.
You had no one to accompany you this far. If Agravain lent you his help, it wasn't because he believed in you. There is no seer who can advise you along the way. As if the fate that put you on this path had abandoned you from the beginning.
You are not naive enough to delude yourself that things will change when all this is over. You have to believe that it is a valid price to pay for what you are about to do, because now you can no longer go back.
You will undo everything you were, everything you are. You're not sure if you'll still be anything after that.
But you can't care about what you might have been if there had been another way. Not anymore. It didn't matter to your father, a bastard born of deception too virtuous to let you become king like he did. You should follow his example, at least this time, and bury all visions of a brighter future.
Even if you had the chance to rebel in the past, you can't do it now. You are just the shadow that must suffocate the light.
You see him, your father, in front of you. Proud and terrible. White and shining. The sun that disappeared from the sky was incarnated in him.
It will burn you, and you know it. You are already defeated. You're better off accepting it and giving up. He will never forgive you, you would die anyway, but at least you would have consciously chosen something, even just once in your entire life.
There's no more time.
As much as it is a crime, as much as it is useless and does not fulfill your hopes, you will do what is right. What you want, what you have to.
All you will do is fulfill desires that were never entirely yours. You have to accept your nature. You are just an instrument of fate.
And when your father dies, you will bring no new dawn. Only darkness and silence, again.
You could have had a normal life. Arthur might have made you his heir. Or he would simply smile at you, every now and then. He would have spoken to you with the same love with which he spoke to your brothers. If he hadn't believed in the prophecy. If I hadn't hated you. If you had not hated him, fulfilling your fate.
You never had a choice.
You had to get here no matter what. You have shed too much blood and tears. Gawain, who, however loyal he was to the wrong person, was still your brother, was only the last of the sacrifices, of the bodies you had to pile up to climb to this moment.
You can't stop anymore. There is nothing left that can save your soul, or at least deprive you of the painful awareness of having lived in vain.
Your father was a glorious and ephemeral flame. You were born just to turn the page.
Nothing more than this.
You existed for him, and together with him you will die. There is nothing you can do to change things now.
Just a moment and you will be free from everything. Whatever awaits you in hell will be no worse than the years you spent on this Earth.
And as his spear slides into you, as his light pierces you, you just wish you had another chance, to go back, change fate, and be happy.
But it's too late. Your name will always be a whisper in the darkness, a black stain in this shining legend, and in your torn body there is no longer enough breath to cry out your pain.
Camlann stands silently over your ruin.